Beyond the Whiteness – Global Capitalism and White Supremacy: thoughts
on movement building and anti-racist organizing

One of the most exciting developments that has come out of the mass
actions – in Seattle, Washington DC, Windsor, Canada, Philadelphia and
Los Angeles – is the movement-wide discussion about racism, white supremacy
and organizing strategies to build a multiracial radical movement for global
justice . Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martínez’s widely distributed essay,
“Where Was the Color in Seattle”, put forward the question – why, if global
capitalism has the greatest negative impact on people of color around the
world and in the United States, was the direct action against the WTO so
overwhelming white? Her essay helped launch a dialogue in alternative media
and in activists groups throughout the United States and beyond.

Among activists of color, the question has generally been, “how can
we bring an analysis of global capitalism and global justice to our local
organizing efforts?” White activists have responded to Betita’s essay
by asking themselves, “how can we get people of color to join our groups
and movement?” But this isn’t the most useful question that we should
be asking. The question to struggle with is, “How can we be anti-racist
activists dedicated to bringing down white supremacy?” White activists
need to work on developing our understanding of white supremacy, how white
privilege operates in the activist movement and how we can bring solid
anti-racist politics to the work that we do.

The idea that we just need to get more people of color to join our groups
is an example of how white activists have internalized white supremacy.
It carries the idea that we have all the answers and now they just need
to be delivered to people of color. The alternative, of course, would be
something like, people of color have been organizing for a long time (500+
years), and we (white activists) have a lot to learn, so maybe we should
find ways to form alliances, relationships, and coalitions to work with
people of color and be prepared to learn as well as share.

The other major aspect of ‘how can we get more people of color to join
our group’ is the idea that anti-racist consciousness develops through
osmosis – i.e. that if white people sit in the same room as people of color,
we will begin to understand how white supremacy operates and therefore
we won’t really need to talk about it. We need to be clear that multiracial
doesn’t automatically mean anti-racist. The US military is multiracial
in composition, but clearly serves the interests of imperialism and white
supremacy. Similarly, an anti-racist group of whites can work to end white
supremacy. What we are envisioning is a consciously anti-racist and multiracial
movement against global capitalism.

It is absolutely true that white people learn about racism through interactions
and relationships with people of color. But in terms of how we plan to
do this work in activism, our goal cannot be to bring in people of color
and expect that they will school us. Organizers of color have enough work
already. In our pursuit to get educated, we need to go to more events and
actions organized by people of color and show support, listen and learn.
We need to read the amazing writers that are out there. We can pay attention
to how the system works (when we are in jail, in court, in classrooms,
at work and on the street). We can build relationships and learn from each
other. But, just as men cannot expect women to educate them about sexism
and heteros cannot expect queers to give them the homophobia 101 class
whenever it is deemed appropriate, white people have a responsibility to
work on racism together and not just wait until a person of color brings
it up.

Here’s an example of this kind of dynamic. Men in Food Not Bombs (the
group I’ve worked with) would often talk about sexism in terms of how can
we get more women taking on more responsibility and create equal power.
The conversations would sometimes turn to questions like, How can we check
our behavior that is preventing women from taking on responsibility? And,
What kind of internal culture do we have and how does it privilege men
and keep women down? These conversations about what men should do were
very useful – as men should worry less about what women are and aren’t
doing and think more about what they as men are and aren’t doing. The women
in the group are just as capable, just as responsible, just as intelligent,
once men stop occupying all of the space and learn to share power. Men
worrying less about appeasing women and more about ending sexism is what
must happen.

This is how we need to think about racism. Too often I hear white activists
talk about why more people of color aren’t in the group – as opposed to
whether or not we really have an understanding of how deeply racism impacts
the issues we’re working on and whether or not there are organizations
and activists of color already working on these issues so that we can form
working relationships.

White supremacy is a system of power. The definition of white supremacy
that I use comes from Sharon Martinas and the Challenging White Supremacy
Workshop. White supremacy is a historically based, institutionally perpetuated
system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations and peoples
of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent; for the
purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege.
White supremacy operates through racial oppression against people of color:
slavery, genocide, anti-immigration, driving while Black, etc. Along with
white privilege to white people: not being thought of as a criminal every
time you walk into a store, for example. All the while, white supremacy
maintains real power for the ruling class who control the major institutions
of society.

The impact white supremacy has on white folks is rarely looked at, especially
in relationship to activism and organizing. White privilege means that
white people don’t have to think about racism. White privilege means that
white people can think of themselves as normal and generalize universally
that what they experience is the standard. White privilege is a major barrier
to activism and has historically undermined radical multiracial and anti-racist
movement building. An example is white radicals organizing actions that
involve possible arrest without thinking about how people of color have
a very different relationship to the police – i.e. police brutality is
a daily reality in communities of color and people of color are treated
different at the hands of police generally speaking. White privilege often
leads to white activists thinking that their way of organizing is the only
way to organize and that their tactics are the most radical tactics.

In the political punk zine HeartAttack, activist Helen Luu wrote about
the whiteness of the protests in Seattle as well as the left/anarchist
movement generally. Luu looked at how middle class white activists often
have the privilege to choose issues and to choose tactics and stated that
they generally have less to lose by engaging in activism. People of color,
on the other hand, generally have to focus their activism on survival issues
– like police brutality, housing, welfare rights, environmental toxins
next door – that impact their lives and communities in concrete ways. Luu
argues that we need to rethink the way that we define activism and I would
argue that white radicals need to seriously examine how we talk about issues
and tactics, in terms of what is deemed militant and what issues are described
as radical, in relationship to how white supremacy operates.

White privilege undermines solidarity in the way that white activists
can be “blinded by the white”. By this, I mean white activists often fail
to comprehend the implications of communities of color organizing and building
their capacities to fight to get toxins out of their neighborhood, for
improved public transportation, for accountable public schools, for an
end to police violence, for an end to INS deportation. The system of white
supremacy defines white people as human, and people of color as inferior,
subhuman, marginal – undeserving of services, let alone basic human rights.
The racially coded public discussions of social policies illustrate the
contempt white society has for people of color: fear of ‘brown bodies’
crossing ‘white borders’ with ‘illegitimate and illegal brown babies’ sucking
up ‘white tax dollars’ in ‘Black controlled welfare departments’
of ‘inner cities where welfare queen mothers raise the next generation
of juvenile crime delinquents’.

The discussion around organizing and anti-racism was taken up by Jason
Wade and Steve Stewart, in their article, “The Battle for our Lives” from
the anarchist journal, the Arsenal. They argue that activists/organizers
must develop analysis that connects sweatshop labor in Indonesia to sweatshop
labor in the United States and demonstrate that global capitalism creates
misery in the third world and misery in the United States as well. They
write, “We need to take the momentum from the anti-global capitalism struggles
and connect them with struggles against police brutality, for health care,
against welfare cutbacks, for better access to education, struggles that
grow from our neighborhoods and build a serious revolutionary critique,
vision and movement to redistribute power back to our everyday lives.”
They argue, “We have to struggle around these ‘everyday life’ issues if
we hope to build a more multiracial movement.”

With this in mind, white activists need to think about anti-racist organizing
in at least a couple of ways. One, white privilege is the flipside of racial
oppression and each must be challenged if we are to move towards equality.
Two, when people of color oppose racism they are also re-affirming their
humanity in a social order that denies this and that is why struggles around
racism have been such catalysts for revolutionary social change as they
challenge the very foundation of this society – white supremacy. White
radicals need to think about ways of talking about and organizing against
white privilege – in the predominately white sectors of the movement and
in general white society. It’s also important for white radicals to remember
that organizing against racism is also about freeing our own humanity from
the grip of the slave society.

White radicals also need to think about how we go about forming working
relationships with people of color. Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Chicana
author/activist, writes about how white activists often talk about helping
other people – helping the people at Big Mountain, the farm workers, indigenous
communities working to keep toxins out of their neighborhoods, political
prisoners, etc. Anzaldúa writes, as they (white folks) learn our
histories and understand our struggles, “They will come to see that they
are not helping us but following our lead”. This is a major distinction
– no white savior coming to make it all better, but rather white allies
working in solidarity with people of color in a way that respects leadership
and builds trust and respect.

White activists finding ways to show solidarity and act as allies with
people of color is critical. It’s not about helping other people with their
issues or acting from a sense of guilt, but rather taking responsibility
for racial injustice and recognizing how we are impacted by the issues.
As Black feminist author/activist Barbara Smith says, “In political struggles
there wouldn’t be any ‘your’ and ‘my’ issues, if we saw each form of oppression
as integrally linked to the others.”

This is an exciting time with great possibilities. We need to be ready
to make mistakes, make hard decisions and experiment with anti-racist organizing
that really does aim at challenging white supremacy while confronting global
capitalism.

In doing our work, it is important to have vision and hold on to it.
When I think about and imagine the kind of movement of which I want to
be a part, it is: multiracial and anti-racist – absolutely dedicated to
self-determination for all oppressed people and ending white supremacy
; feminist with a commitment to develop new social relationships based
on equality and bring down the social structures based on domination; queer
liberationist with a commitment to challenging heterosexism and creating
freedom to safely define our own sexualities and genders; multigenerational
and full of energy, wisdom and a desire to make healthy communities for
all of us to care for and learn from each other; anti-capitalist with a
deep analysis of how the system deforms and dehumanizes us joined with
a vision of a new order based on social cooperation and ecological sustainability;
and democratic with a passion for collective liberation and empowerment,
along with an eye for organizing strategies that have direct action, collective
action and solidarity building at their core.